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Our old blogging buddy M.A. Peel recently returned from Italy where she took this photo. “A lazy Saturday in Assisi and the medieval heralds are doing their thing.” San Francisco di Assisi. August 16, 2014.

Mrs Peel was there for a workshop in Renaissance polyphony. While she was in the hometown of the new pope’s namesake, she took the opportunity to brush up on the biography and character of St Francis and filed this report.

A Siberian tigress and her cub acting according to their natures at the Buffalo Zoo. Photo via Wikipedia.

At the now Rosamond Gifford Zoo at Burnett Park but was then called simply the Burnett Park Zoo, where we spent a lot of time when we lived in Syracuse and the Mannion guys were bite-size, the tigers used to like to sit right up next to the thick plate glass windows in the concrete fence at the top of their enclosure and look out at the humans looking in. I think they were looking at us. Who knows? They might have been looking right past us or at their own reflections. And who knows what they were thinking. It did not appear to be “Mmmm. Lunch!” To me, they seemed to be affecting a studied indifference, as if they were thinking, “I see you looking at me. I can see you’re excited and curious and want me to be the same about you, but, frankly, you bore me.”

In other words, they were acting like what they are.

Cats.

Sometimes they would stretch out and go to sleep right there with their backs---long backs, very long backs. Tigers are big big cats.---up against the glass. Which I took as an expression of another cat-like attitude. “Oh. You want to see my face? Watch me move? You came here hoping to see a tiger acting tiger-y? Sorry, I’m busy with more important matters.”

In case you’re worried about the effect of Syracuse winters on jungle cats, these were Siberian tigers, not to be confused with their slightly smaller and leaner but more notorious Bengal tiger cousins. Siberian tigers call the birch forests of far eastern Russia and parts of northern China and North Korea home, places where a typical Syracuse winter would get shrugged off as a mild spring. Siberian tigers know from snow.

At the zoo, the landscape inside the tigers’ enclosure was wooded and rocky, the ground bumpy, knobby, gullied, and creased by ravines as it sloped steeply downward from their window on the footpath around the zoo. They might have found the space a bit confining. Wild Siberian tigers like to roam. They’ll range over territories of 1200 to 1600 square miles. And they might have liked more ground cover and underbrush to camp out in. Otherwise it might have reminded them of the the Northeast Asian mountainsides they call home, except that Northeast Asia was not their home. North America was their home. They were born and raised in captivity.

The spaces zoo animals are confined to should be as open, un-cage-like, and natural as possible.

But here’s the question.

What is natural to an animal that has lived all its life in a city zoo?

Zoos have traditionally been built a certain way: Animals on the inside, humans on the outside, peering in. This separation is good in theory—humans and animals need to be protected from one another—but terrible in practice, as animals end up stripped of any semblance of a natural habitat. A new plan for the Givskud Zoo in Denmark wants to reverse those roles, giving animals more freedom in captivity while effectively placing humans inside protective barriers.

Called Zootopia, the conceptual design comes from danish firm BIG. The firm began working with Givskud Zoo a couple years ago with the goal of turning the safari style zoo into a place where animals dictate interaction—not humans. “Try to imagine if you asked the animals what they would like. What would they decide?” says Richard Østerballe, director of the Givskud Zoo. “They want their nature back, so to speak, and we are going to try to create that.”

To make that happen BIG is looking to invert the traditional safari park. In this design, animals will roam free around the perimeter while humans observe, hidden away from view in underground passageways and naturalistic architecture structures. Visitors can watch lions through an underground enclosure disguised as a hill. They’ll peek out at giraffes through windowed lodges built into the side of a hilly savannah. Outside of the main circular entrance, there will be no traditional buildings. Even the stables will be disguised as natural habitat, with the elephants lolling about a wide open rice field that camouflages the shelter below and bears that find shelter in a stable disguised as a pile of logs. “We want to take away human influence,” says Østerballe.

Sounds like it will be an interesting and fun place to visit, but I’m not sure what’s actually gained by it. The whole conception is based on a not completely groundless but still debatable and sentimental idea, that Nature is more natural when human beings keep out of it. Do the designers really think the animals will act more like their true animal selves if they don’t feel themselves being observed by human beings? That strikes me kind of like thinking the famous Far Side cartoon is an accurate depiction of the lives of cows.

Animals and human beings have shared habitats and interacted for millennia, with so much mutual adaptation that it’s nearly impossible to make a distinction between the natural, that is animal, world and the human world. There are very few places where humans can’t live and few where animals don’t. Mostly we share the planet and try to get along. Well, they try. We’re only still learning to try.

There are animals best interacted with at a distance. Siberian tigers, for instance. But also Great White Sharks and Grizzly Bears, although people share the water with more Great Whites and more often than they know, and other bears, like the black bears who seem to be making themselves at home in the suburbs around here, are not only comfortable in the (somewhat near) company of human beings, they have adapted themselves to it to the point that it’s natural to them, if not to to us quite as much. Take away the presence of people and they would have to re-adapt, that is, make a change in their natures they might not like. The bears in Givskud are getting quarters that look like piles of logs. The black bears here might prefer a nice split-level or a cozy Cape Cod.

The bears are oddballs, though. From most animals’ points of view, the species best kept at a distance is homo sapiens. Siberian tigers didn’t become endangered by eating each other.

Still, which is the more “naturally” pachyderm-ish? The Asian elephants in the jungles or the ones living and working and getting along with humans in the villages?

I’m convinced the tigers at the Syracuse zoo knew we were there and eagerly watching them, waiting for them to show us their tiger-y-ness, and deliberately refused to play along. But like I said, they’re cats and I’m a bigot when it comes to cats, a virulent anti-felinite. (Don’t be offended. Of course I love your cat.) It may be that sitting around looking bored is what tigers do best. Surprisingly, they aren’t particularly good hunters and have to wait patiently for hours even days for easy and unsuspecting prey to wander by and then, after gorging themselves, which they do because it may be a week before they get a chance to feast again, they lie around lazily, letting their stomachs settle.

But there was a gibbon at the zoo who who almost every hour on the hour would climb to a platform on top of a tall pole and start hooting---I swear, a gibbon’s hoot can drown out a firehouse siren and be heard at a greater distance---until he decided he’d drawn enough of a crowd of humans. Then he would swing down to a slightly lower network of ropes and poles and begin a spectacular acrobatic routine that sure looked well-rehearsed and designed to elicit the maximum of thrilled Ooohs and ahhs and applause from his audience. I don’t know if like Alex the Lion in Madagascar he thought of himself as the star of the zoo, but he clearly enjoyed wowing the paying customers.

And then there were the markhors.

Markhors are wild goats from northeastern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. In our Syracuse days, I was writing feature stories for the newspaper and the zoo was one of my beats---another of my beats was the theater scene and there’s a joke in there that I never made out loud and still refuse to make.---and covering the zoo was one of my favorite jobs. Reporting and writing those stories made me feel like the kind of New Yorker style journalist I wanted to be, a regular John McPhee. The best part, though, was getting to go behind the scenes and meet the animals up close and personal.

By the way, sloths come by their names deceptively. They do spend a lot of their time hanging from branches with no apparent urge to move for hours on end, but when they decide to move they move fast. And they’re mean. The zookeeper who introduced me to the zoo’s two-toed sloths had long, ugly scratches on her forearm from when a sloth she normally got along with decided to assert himself.

The markhors were brand-new to the zoo when I met them. Their exhibit hadn’t technically opened yet. A small herd had been brought in and they were all young. Mature males are remarkably ugly beasts. Mature females are just plain goatish looking. But kids are cute as can be and seem to know it and present you with their cuteness as a gift. “I’m being adorable just for you!” They’re frisky and playful and friendly, almost like puppies. When I was entered their enclosure, the whole herd surrounded me and jostled with each other for the privilege of standing on their hind legs with their front hooves against my chest to be petted. When the zookeeper and I took a tour around their enclosure they followed us close at heels, impatient for us to stop so they could do the whole meet and greet and pet routine all over again.

The point is, these markhors hadn’t had time to get used to being gawked at yet but they were already happy to have the attention from a couple of human beings, probably because humans had been involved in their raising since birth. To them, it was natural to have people for company.

Anyway, even if you could recreate an animal’s “natural” habitat in someplace like Givskud or Syracuse---really, never mind maintaining a jungle or a tundra in a temperate zone, how do you give a Siberian tiger several hundred square miles in which to roam?---you’d have to do more than keep human beings out of sight. You’d have to let other animals in to mix and mingle as they do in the wild, which is not something you’d necessarily want human children or human adults, for that matter, to see. An exhibit of lions and gazelles, for example, would soon turn into an exhibit of lions.

Zoos are like living encyclopedias---zoopedias---good places to start to learn. A Zootopia sounds to me like a theme park.

If the zoo back in Syracuse had been converted into a Zootopia, with human visitors suddenly turned invisible, the gibbon would have been heartbroken, the markhors bereft, and even the tigers might have missed their audience. They’re cats, after all, and that’s part of cats’ nature, feigning indifference while desperately craving our complete and doting attention.

A Florida chaplain on Thursday accused a secular group of trying to turn him into an atheist because he was no longer allowed to pray with students at high school football games.

After receiving a complaint from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Orange County public school district recently ordered school leaders to ban chaplains from conducting school-sanctioned religious services.

During a Thursday interview with Fox & Friends host Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Pastor Troy Schmidt explained that he used to pray with football players at Olympia High School until the district banned him.

“Well, I don’t think they’ve read the Constitution,” he said. “It’s pretty clear that they cannot prohibit my free expression of my faith or the free expression of the coaches to express their faith. They’re telling us to be atheists, when we want to say this is what we believe. And we want to express it freely like the Constitution says.”

Like the Constitution says.

You and I and James Madison might look at the Bill of Rights and not find where it says the right to turn public, secular events into specifically Christian religious services shall not be abridged. But Right Wing Christians find it right there in the first amendment where it says “Congress shall make no law…prohibiting the free exercise” of religion. Congress, by the way, has been making no such laws, and would much rather make laws that require the forced exercise of religion. It’s the Supreme Court that’s been not making such laws but preventing de facto establishment of such laws by the majority imposing its religion on minorities, but never mind. The point is that clearly Right Wing Christians like Schmidt think their free exercise of religion is “prohibited” by their not being allowed to pray in public and coerce others to pray along with them.

Of course, Jesus said something very specific about praying in public, but Christians have never been much interested in what Jesus himself said about anything, which is odd, considering how Jesus-centered they think their faith is.

Again, never mind.

They feel their Constitutional rights are violated when they are not free to violate the Constitutional rights of anybody and everybody who doesn’t adhere to their version of Christianity, when they are not free to do whatever they believe their angry, vindictive, capricious version of God wants them to do, like force other people to pray in public along with them, but also deny gay people the right to marry whomever they love, deny them the right to live open, whole, shame-free normal lives, deny women the right to make their own decisions regarding their health and their bodies, deny other people’s children the right to a real education teaching them actual science, history, and art, and deny their fellow Americans who aren’t also their co-religionists the right to worship as we see fit or not worship.

We all tend to use the phrase “freedom to worship.” I sort of just did at the end of that last paragraph. But we’re misstating it.

It should be “freedom of worship.” Which is slightly different, putting the emphasis on belief over practice.

We’re all free to believe what we choose to believe. Putting those beliefs into practice is where the trouble begins, because whatever we do in public affects others around us who probably don’t want to be affected. You go your way, and I’ll go mine is a lovely sentiment but in practice we might find that your way and my way are taking us through the same narrow doorway at the exact same time and we’re going to collide.

At any rate, the proper phrasing for liberals and the liberal-minded should be freedom of worship. It would be ironic, though, if Right Wing Christians said it that way.

Read all of David Edwards’ story, Florida pastor lashes out at atheists because he wants school prayer ‘like the Constitution says’, at Raw Story. I like how Schmidt seems to believe that not being allowed to pretend to be part of a high school football team by praying with the players before the game will turn him into an atheist, as if it takes to be an atheist is to go on about the business of enjoying ourselves at a football game without acting as if God’s taking a rooting interest in what happens under the Friday Night Lights.

That craft whiskey you’re planning to give to your boss for his birthday? Did you look at the label? Did you wonder how your local distillery that’s only been in business for eleven years managed to produce a fourteen year old Bourbon?

Read the promotional materials for the Rancho de Los Luceros Destilaría and you form an image of a supremely artisanal effort. The distillery creates “small batch heirloom spirits handcrafted in New Mexico.” Each batch of their rye whiskies, vodka, and gin is “individual and unique,” and “each bottle is hand bottled and hand marked with batch and bottle number.”

These are the standard selling points of the craft-distilling movement, with its locavore lingo, terroir talk, and handmade hype. But, in the new crowd of micro-distillers, it is now standard for the alcohol being sold to come not from their own distinctive stills, but from a hulking factory in Indiana.

First day of class. I'm teaching Public Intellectuals and the Digital Commons again. This time I'm doing it like Rumpole when he did the Penge Bungalow Murders, alone and without a leader. Steve Kuusisto is teaching a course on his lonesome called The Literature of Contemplation. It's very zen. I wish I could take it. But anyway, here I am, going over my syllabus and lecture notes, thinking about what I'm going to say to the students by way of an introduction. Maybe I'll just read them this post I wrote at the beginning of the semester last fall.

Note: I'm not Skyping in today like I had to first day last year. I'm on my way to Syracuse right now (Don’t worry. I’m stopped at a rest stop. I’m not blogging and driving.) and I'll be there live and in person. Some of you may remember that last summer's medical surprise was an attack of shingles that closed up my eye and threatened the vision in it. Thank goodness, this summer it was just diabetes.

I’m getting back on the road. I hope you’ll meet me in class, virtually, by joining the class’ Facebook group page, Digital Commoners…

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As much fun as I have on Twitter, as much use as I make of Facebook, as grateful as I am for all the rewards, pleasures, and friendships I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy as a blogger, and as excited as I am to be teaching a course this fall that might as well be called The Romance and Glory of a Life Lived Virtually, it’s really the case that as a writer whose medium happens to be a blog, I’m really an enemy of social media and everything blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine, reddit and all the rest stand for.

The effect---in fact the purpose---of social media is to keep people glued to their computer screens.

My intention is to drive you away from your keyboards at least as far away as your couch and maybe only to another screen, the small one that’s your television, the large one at the multiplex, but preferably out the door and into the great wide analog world beyond.

The message of almost all my posts is the same. Get offline and do something real.

Read this book. See this movie. Watch this show. Go to this play. Take a walk. Take a drive. Notice this bird, that tree, those flowers. Visit this museum, that gallery. Head on down to the library. Go out to the garage and fix something. Go to the hardware store to get that tool or that part you didn’t know you needed until you started to fix whatever it is you decided to try to fix because if that incompetent Mannion can do it, how hard can it be? Go out for a cup of coffee, pay attention to the person pouring it for you. Sit out on the porch tonight and listen. To the geese down on the river. To the peepers in the trees. To the children laughing somewhere out there in the shadows. Have some pie.

There’s a lot to be wary of and a lot to criticize about a life lived too much in the cloud, as Aristophanes noted two and a half thousand years before there was an internet. But I’m not truly an enemy of the online life in the main, or social media in particular. I call myself that to describe an effect of my interests as a writer not as a purpose born of philosophical or moral principle.

I have good times in the ether, I learn stuff, I meet good people. And of course, never mind LanceMannion.com, Lance Mannion himself, myself, whateverself wouldn’t exist without the web.

And here I am, on the first day of class, preparing my introductory lecture for a course whose main object is to help students prepare to live their professional and intellectual lives at least partially online.

If that’s not enough irony for you, try this.

I’m not even going to be there.

One-eyed blogging I’m a whiz at. One-eyed driving? Probably not a good idea. So I’m staying put this week and sending my virtual self up to Syracuse to sub.

I’m Skyping in.

Boy, I love the 21st Century!

So, at least for today, I’m doing what I usually try not to do. Forcing people to look at a computer screen.

Tuesday. 5:30 a.m. On the road, headed north. Wipers going. Air full of dew. Windshield wet as if driving into rain. The road ahead still dark as night but the sky’s lightening. Where the trees open up to the east I can see across fields to the mountains on the far side of the Hudson. No sun yet but there are fingerpaint smears of pale orange sky along the horizon. To the west white mist filling the orchards. First day of class. Four hours to Syracuse.

Thank you to all who’ve donated to the fundraiser so far! You’re terrific! Thanks to you all the daily goals have been met. One more day of fundraising ought to do it. I hope folks don’t mind. This is really helping to save the day.

I’m sure there really are Republicans in Congress who don’t like voting for budget cuts. They shake their heads, grit their teeth, and force themselves to do it anyway for a variety of reasons.

Some of them do it for what they think are sound economic reasons. Others have reasonable political reservations. Increased federal spending does increase federal power and expand bureaucracies up and down the line. Many do it because they have moral objections to government spending that are practically religious in being articles of faith they accept without question as if they learned them in Sunday School, which some of them did.

Their moral objections may be informed by their political and economic ideas, although I think it more usually works the other way, with their religious convictions muddling their political and economic thinking, but this last group, which includes lots of Republicans from the first two, votes for cuts to programs they understand might be worthwhile in the abstract but which they believe in practice harm the people they’re meant to help by undermining their moral characters.

They vote in ways liberals see as heartless shreddings of the safety net and deliberate sabotaging of the economy with the same regrets as well-meaning parents telling children they can’t have a second helping of desert or they can’t go to a party because they have chores to do. They do it, even though they’d just as soon make the kids happy, because it’s their job to build character.

They see themselves as teaching lessons in self-reliance, impulse control, delayed gratification, and priorities to the entire nation.

Well, to that part of the nation that needs those lessons. You know, them.

It happens that their economic reasons aren’t sound, their political objections aren’t reasonable, and the morals they wish to instill are actually corrosive, morally, spiritually, and socially and do far more harm to individuals and the nation than good.

For every one of them who learns to stand on their own two feet, there are ten who are just knocked flat in their tracks and wind up spending all their time and energy trying to crawl out of the way of oncoming trains while dragging sick and hungry children with them.

In short, these Republicans are being dumb because their political, economic, or moral principles are based on assumptions and prejudices that have no basis in reality.

The facts, the numbers, the history, and the science just aren’t there to back them up.

It’s pious make-believe.

But never mind. My point stands. Whichever group they belong to, the Republicans I’m talking about, who are not the majority in Congress---the majority loves to cut spending---do not like to vote for budget cuts. They do it with a sigh and even with spasms of pain because it’s the right thing to do.

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge has probably run its course, having reached the stage where it’s bordering on self-parody. It’s done good while it’s lasted---and see Tom Watson on the carpers and self-righteous wet blankets or, in this case, resolutely dry blankets---and I hope it lasts a while longer to do even more good. But more and more we’re just getting celebrity self-promotion and a lot of moral grandstanding. You always know things have crossed a line when politicians start joining in.

A flash flood of outrage coursed through my Twitter stream the other day when someone noticed that many of the Republican Congresscritters who took the Ice Bucket Challenge had voted to cut federal funding for ALS research and treatment and then, as too often happens on Twitter, people began retweeting this “news” without bothering to look into it. “Hypocrites!” went the general hue and tweet.

Things died down quickly but not, as far as I could tell, because anyone had done any follow-up googling.

The outrage machine had simply switched gears.

Can you tell I have some issues with Twitter?

I’m still trying to figure out how to explain this to my students who are going to be required to use Twitter this fall.

Anywho…

These Republicans were assumed to be hypocrites, which, when you’re talking (or tweeting) about Republicans is a fair assumption. One of them was Paul Ryan and he’s the walking definition of hypocrisy.

Tell us again how you got rich working that Weinermobile, Congressman.

It turns out, inconveniently for us self-righteous liberals, that a bunch of Democrats who took the challenge voted along with those Republicans to cut that funding.

Whoops.

Well, here’s the thing.

They, the Democrats and those Republicans, didn’t vote to cut funding for ALS research. Not specifically and, probably, in the case of several of them, not knowingly. They voted for a budget deal that prevented default and a government shutdown by giving the Republican hostage-takers what John Boehner crowed was 98 percent of what he wanted in terms of arbitrary, across the board budget cuts and implementing the sequester, and the agencies that oversee and administer some medical research programs got whacked along with everybody else.

(Editor’s note: See the links at the bottom of this post.)

Some of that funding has been restored, by the way. The sequester, however, is still unconscionably in effect.

The Democrats would rather not have had to do it. I would bet that all the Republicans were glad to, except the ones who wanted deeper cuts or were looking forward to a shutdown. The crazies who thought default would be a good thing didn’t vote for the deal.

Now, here’s the other thing.

Even if they had voted to cut ALS research, specifically and knowingly, taking the Ice Bucket Challenge wouldn’t necessarily have made them hypocrites.

Funding medical research and the treatment of illnesses and diseases is a charitable endeavor, and whatever mix of economic, political, and moral objections to federal spending individual conservatives have, they all tend to agree as an article of that government shouldn’t do the work best left to private agencies.

Their argument goes something like this:

Private agencies are more efficient at delivering aid because it’s their job to be, as opposed to the job of government agencies which is simply to extend government power and give work to the otherwise unemployable. (This is the old Have you been to the DMV lately? argument and it assumes nobody competent wants a government job.) Private agencies are usually local or locally focused and therefore they know the needs of the localities they serve better than the government way of in Washington. (Debatable, but there’s good evidence on the local side. It’s not quite the DMV argument rephrased, but we’ve all had to deal with government bureaucrats following rules handed down from above that serve the interests of the higher-ups back in the home office but make no sense applied to matters right here and now.) And, if the money stops coming in from the government, more money will actually make its way to where its needed, because, one, with their tax bills lowered, people will have more money left in the wallets that they’ll give to charity (Right, because the mechanic will fix the car for free and the kids can go without new shoes for another couple of months.); two, people will be more willing to donate when they know the money is going to help people they might regard as their neighbors; and, three, people can’t let themselves off the hook by telling themselves they don’t have to worry about those in need, the government is taking care of the problem.

By the way, somewhere in that last bit of tangled logic there is a point to be considered.

Scrooge absolves himself from having to care about the plight of the poor and unfortunate by pointing out that he pays taxes that go towards funding the early Victorian version of a safety net. In that narrow, very narrow, way he can be seen as a good liberal for his time. Never mind. It’s a very real temptation that people give into all the time under all kinds of circumstances, because we’re all human, which is to say, basically weak, lazy, and selfish, to tell ourselves we don’t have to do something because it’s somebody else’s job.

Of course, the right thing to do is to pay your taxes, vote to support, reinforce, and expand the safety net and give willingly and freely to charity.

Still. there’s no hypocrisy in voting against government funding of charities as long as you also then give to charity straight out of your own pocket.

You’re just wrong in thinking you’re doing more real good by it.

But the debate these days isn’t really over whether or not the work is best done by private charities, because there is no debate. The answer is no. Without getting too deep into it, simply start with the problems of administering and distributing the needed help (material, monetary, and in kind) on the scale necessary to get it to everyone who needs it. Then there’s the problem of allocation. If we’re all putting five dollars into the same pot, that pot better be a very big one and it’s going to get full very fast. But it doesn’t all go into the same pot. There are thousands of pots to fill. And some of those pots are here, and the money is meant to be spent here. And some of those pots are over there, and that money is meant to spent over there. And the fact is not all of us can’t afford to put five dollars into even one pot, while some of us can afford to put five-hundred dollars into each of a hundred pots. And if the people who can barely manage to scrape together the five bucks are concentrated here and the people who won’t even miss five-hundred are concentrated over there, then the people who need help here aren’t going to get as much help as the people in need over there. In fact, the people in need here will get much less than they need, while the people in need over there will get much more.

But life’s unfair, right?

Yes, it is. And it’s our job to fix that.

It’s why we’re here.

Anyway…

As it happens, there are far more places like here than there are places like over there.

You can believe that charity is work best done by local and private agencies like churches, but you have to be willfully ignorant not to know that very few churches can afford to pay for even one parishioner’s hip replacement let alone hip replacements for the ten who might need them.

And answer me this. How many strangers’ families are you feeding these days? How many strangers’ kids are you putting through school? How many strangers’ elderly parents’ medical bills are you paying?

The answer is…a lot. That’s what you pay taxes for. You’re putting the money into one giant pot along with the rest of us.

But say there’s a lid put on that government pot. Then what? How many strangers will you feed, educate, and help heal out of your own pocket?

If your answer is None, I can’t afford it, that’s my point. Few of us can…on our own.

So, again, like I’ve been saying, you’re not a hypocrite if you vote to cut government spending on “charity” and then take the Ice Bucket Challenge. You’re just wrong if you think it’s the better thing to do.

Dumb, actually.

But there you go.

Now…

Here’s yet one more thing. The last thing for this post.

Whatever the thinking behind these particular Republicans’ votes, as a group Congressional Republicans have made it clear they really don’t care if people in need get any help at all, from the feds, from private philanthropists, from local churches, from any source you can name.

And it’s more than their thinking it’s better for the poor and unfortunate to go it alone or go without because it will make them better persons, more productive citizens, and more fit candidates for heaven.

They think the poor and unfortunate deserve to be left to suffer.

They think they should be punished for being poor and unfortunate.

They think it’s their duty and responsibility to do the punishing.

They take a delight in inflicting it.

It makes them feel righteous and morally and socially superior.

It gives them a thrill.

If they’re also hypocrites, hypocrisy is their lesser sin.

What they are above all is a pack of sadists.

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I’ll come back later and put the links in, but it’s Sunday morning and I’m feeling lazy (Where are the conservatives to help me build character?), so here are a couple of articles that go along with this post:

One of the joys of going to college in Boston was that it’s a beach town.

Well, it is if you make a bit of an effort. And we did, regularly, during the four summers I spent there back in the day. Sometimes my friends and I packed up our suits and towels and headed north to Singing Beach in Manchester-by-the-Sea or Crane Beach in Ipswich. There were good beaches on the South Shore too but once you were out that way it wasn’t much farther to Cape Cod and that’s where we usually ended up.

I’ll tell you one beach we never went to though.

Revere Beach.

Not to beach it, at any rate.

In those days, saying you were going swimming at Revere Beach would have sounded as nuts as saying you were going swimming in the heart of Kenmore Square, the difference being that the sidewalks there were cleaner than the sand at the beach and the neighborhood was safer.

In those days, you didn’t just stay out of the ocean, you didn’t walk along the beach. Not barefoot, anyway. I think there were signs. The sand was as polluted as the water. Take a stroll and with every step you’d kick up candy and popsicle wrappers, paper cups, plastic cups, styrofoam cups, or their broken pieces, cigarette buts, broken glass, the tabs from poptop soda and beer cans, the cans themselves, needles, as hypodermic syringes. not to mention whatever microbes, poisons, and chemical effluents that washed in from the cesspool and aquatic toxic waste dump Boston and its neighboring towns had made of their harbors and bays.

It’s not that we never went out there. I made it to Revere Beach more than a few times, as a matter of fact. It was a place to go to to take a break from school and get away from campus that wasn’t the usual escape. An easy subway and train ride out of downtown Boston on the Blue Line just long enough to make it feel like a real trip to a real somewhere else, you could go up in the late morning, have lunch or a snack at Kelly’s Roast Beef, be back home before mid-afternoon and still feel you’d made day of it.

Kelly’s, by the way, was a landmark seafood and sandwich stand word always had it was on the brink of shuttering. The point was to be able to brag someday that you were one of Kelly’s last customers. Revere Beach is in the city of Revere, a never affluent factory town a few miles north of Boston then on a downward slide. You didn’t want to be caught around there at night or during the day, for that matter. Poverty, drugs, and crime were bleeding the life out things and the neighborhood around the beach looked to be going to pieces. There was the ocean no one swam in. The beach you didn’t walk on. There were the remnants of the arcades and amusements that once made Revere Beach, the first public beach in the United States, a treat and delight and a relief to working and middle class city dwellers, a New England Coney Island, on a smaller scale, and there were a few surviving restaurants and snack stands like Kelly’s, and Kelly’s, everyone said, was sure to be a casualty, sooner rather than later. Better eat there while you still can. And we did. And that’s all we did in Revere. We bought our sandwiches or clam rolls and got out of there.

Still, I have some good memories.

Once a friend and I, continuing a conversation that began over breakfast at a diner near school, walked and talked our way up Comm Av, through the Back Bay, across the Public Garden and the Common, past Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market, and wound up at Government Center. We intended to circle back by way of Beacon Hill and then along the Charles River, but we’d worked up an appetite and decided what we needed for lunch was roast beef sandwiches. Buzzy’s was practically right there but for some reason only Kelly’s would do. Probably we figured this might be our last chance. We hopped on the train, found our way to Kelly’s, grabbed our sandwiches, which we ate sitting on the seawall (This is a key point.), and got out of there. We weren’t done though. Back in Boston, we went to a movie. Wise Blood. And of course we had to talk about that after. We talked about it over pizza. We talked about it over a few beers. We talked about it over coffee. We’d have been still talking about come morning but we were both dead on our feet and finally said goodnight.

Not the most exciting tale, I know, but here’s the thing. That was one of my favorite days from that time in my life and I remember every detail. I can picture the whole day in my head as if I had it on slides and was projecting it on a screen. (Yes, that’s a Kodak Carousel allusion. That’s how long ago this was now.) And not one single slide includes the ocean!

Not even the slide of my friend and I sitting on the seawall with our sandwiches.

It’s the same with my memories of my first visit to the beach, which as you’d expect made a vivid impression. Another friend took me out there, insisting we had to eat at Kelly’s while we still had the chance, because, you know, its days were numbered, the neighborhood being what it was and all. I remember Kelly’s. I remember a pavilion on the sea wall where elderly residents of the neighborhood sat in lawn chairs reading newspapers. I remember a dog inquiring about sharing our sandwiches. I do not remember the beach. Or the ocean. Not even as fleeting glimpse in the background.

This makes me think that it was not just that you didn’t go in the water. You didn’t even look at it!

We’re back home after spending a long weekend mooching off Uncle Merlin and Art the Wonder Dog at their house north of Boston where we were well taken care of. It’s a pleasure to be pampered by a world class pamperer. We didn’t do much. It was just a relief to get away for a change of scenery and a little low-budget, practically no-budget R & R before school starts next week for all three of us Mannion men. Uncle Merlin was especially diligent about fussing over Mrs M who really needed the fussing over. We had a Family Movie Night (The feature was Blade Runner.), had an old friend over for dinner, met another friend for lunch, the guys took Uncle Merlin to see Guardians of the Galaxy at what Oliver has pronounced the best movie theater in America, and that’s about it. Except for on other thing.

We got to the beach.

Revere Beach.

And not to eat at Kelly’s.

To swim.

One summer day, a couple years ago, Uncle Merlin heard that at pizza joint in Revere, Bianchi’s, had been rated as serving the best pizza in the area. Bianchi’s is right by the beach, and the beach is a fifteen minute drive up Route 1 from Uncle Merlin’s house. He went out there to try a slice and made a discovery.

Somebody had cleaned up the beach.

And the ocean.

That somebody being the state of Massachusetts.

In the early 1990s, the state began building the now massive Deer Island Waste Water Treatment Plant. No sooner did that begin operating than the state set to work expanding and improving it. In a little over twenty years Boston Harbor has been transformed from “the dirtiest harbor in America” (You may remember its starring role in one of George Herbert Walker Bush’s attack ads from his 1988 Presidential campaign against then Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis.) to what the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, which manages the plant, can justly boast of as a “Great American Jewel.”

More or less at the same time as the harbor was getting cleaned up, a major reclamation of the beach began. Giant dredgers were brought in, Uncle Merlin tells me, and dug up the entire beach, sifting and replacing the sand to a depth of six feet.

Meanwhile, Revere has bounced back somewhat, and the neighborhood fronting the beach has been revitalized. Kelly’s is still going strong. No one’s talking about its imminent demise.

The result is more than just a sprucing up of the beach. More than a restoration. It’s practically a whole new place.

Once upon a time there was something here called Revere Beach, now there’s something else, which is called Revere Beach in its memory.

“We did this,” I said to Uncle Merlin, as we sat in the sand, drying off, and gazed out at the remarkably blue ocean.

By we, I explained, I meant human beings. And what we did was ruin the place and then fix it.

This is what we’ve always done. We’ve always been good at turning one sort of place into another sort of place.

Often we’ve done this by making messes.

We’ve been very good at making messes.

Lately, in the last forty years or so, we’ve discovered we’re also good at cleaning them up.

I was leading us into a discussion of climate change denial.

Denialists have a number of arguments to support their denialism. Most of them boiled down are economic and, translated from derp, amount to “I don’t want to pay for fixing it!” Others are political. These denialists simply refuse to admit Al Gore was right. Some are stubbornly, selfishly personal. “No way I’m giving up any of my fun or inconveniencing myself for something that probably isn’t happening anyway.” But for a great many denialists, it’s religious.

Climate change is God’s will.

Actually, it may be wrong to call them denialists. Many of them don’t deny the earth’s warming and the climate’s changing because of it.

What they deny is that humans have had anything to do with it.

That’s why the phrase “man-made” keeps popping out of their mouths.

Everything that happens happens as a part of God’s plan. If the earth is warming and the climate’s changing, God planned it. And all God’s plans are for our ultimate good, no matter how miserable the working out of His plans may make us here and now. Which implies that making us miserable is something God does deliberately. He wants us to be unhappy. He takes our jobs, takes our homes, gives us cancer, kills off friends and family, wipes out our towns, sends us famines, wars, and pestilence, all to make us fit to join Him in heaven.

It all goes back to Adam and Eve, I think, and they and their descendents being cursed to earn their living with the sweat of their brow. We got ourselves thrown out of paradise and now we have to wait for God in His infinite Wisdom to decide we’ve earned an invitation back in.

But, its being God’s will that we’re miserable, it follows that it’s an act against God to try to make ourselves less miserable. We’re challenging His plan. That’s what Lucifer did, isn’t it?

What this leads to is an argument that it would be actually wrong to do anything about climate change or to reverse global warming.

If this means letting large portions of the earth dry up or ice over or drown, so be it. His will be done.

This is what you get when you believe in a God who’s a pathological micro-manager.

I don’t.

Well, I don’t believe in any god these days. But when I did I believed in a God who gave us our big brains.

And he did have a plan. It went like this.

“Here’s the manual. Here are the keys. You already got the brains. You’ll figure it out. I’m off to create other universes. Come find me when you’re ready.”

The bible says God gave us dominion over the earth. Some believers think that means he gave us the earth to own and use as we see fit. I think it means he’s letting us rent the place for a while and we’re meant to take good care of it and, when the time comes, hand it over to the next generation of tenants better than we found it.

There are those who think better means paved over, clear cut, scraped down, hollowed out, and pumped dry, but they have no souls.

I think better means Revere Beach. The new Revere Beach.

I think that if we get it together in time and do something to clean up our messes and there is God, when he sends his son back to take back the keys, Jesus is going to show up at Revere Beach, gaze out at the ocean, take a swim, take a walk along the sand, stroll over to Kelly’s for a crab roll, and then, sitting on the seawall, eating his lunch, with which of course he’ll also feed the gathered multitudes and the seagulls, and after gazing out at the ocean some more, he’ll turn to us, smile, and say, “Good job.”

I hope you can put up with a few more days of fundraising. As you know, things are tight here and those surprise bills have us scrambling. So, if you like what’s been going on around here for the last ten years or so and you can swing it, please consider making a donation. It’d be a big, big help.

Thank you to everyone who’s donated so far and helped to meet yesterday’s goal. I’m going to keep the same goal for today, 10 donations of $10. Please keep in mind this is just a suggestion. I know how things are, believe me. If you can manage even a dollar or two, that would be great. Every donation helps and every one is much and truly appreciated.

If you’ve already donated, thanks again. I’m working on getting my thank you notes out. Mom Mannion raised me right and I’m usually very good about these things. Every now and then, though, something will get lost in the ether. If you haven’t heard back from me by Saturday, please let me know and I’ll fix things. Also, I really do enjoy following up with post cards, so I hope you’ve included your current snail mail address.

“I’m going to die surrounded by the biggest idiots in the galaxy!”: From left, legendary outlaw, a legend in his own mind, at least, Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), vengeance-obsessed rage-aholic Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista), bounty hunter and genetic experiment gone awray Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper), warrior and assassin Gamora (Zoe Saldana), and sidekick, muscle, and walking houseplant Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), in their first act as a team of heroes-in-the-making, escape from a high-security space prison in a scene full of thrills, chills, spills, and laughter typical of the new Marvel comic book movie, Guardians of the Galaxy.

Guardians of the Galaxy is the most sentimental of the Marvel comic book movies going back to the days before Stan Lee’s first cameo.

Oh, sure, you could say it’s one of the most fun, one of the funniest, one of the most action and thrill packed, a rousing adventure tale, an old-fashioned pirate movie set in space that’s the pirate movie the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie almost was, a better Star Trek movie than either of J.J. Abrams’ reboots, the best Star Wars movie that isn’t a Star Wars movie (with the added virtue that ancient weapons and hokey religions don’t figure in the fun), a sci-fi Western that will make fans think this was what Buckaroo Banzai and Firefly were leading up to.

You could say all that. Plenty of people have said all that or much of it. Many of you already know all that.

I’m going with sentimental because it’s the critical path less traveled and because it’s true. Guardians of the Galaxy is the most sentimental of Marvel comic book movies because it’s the one with the most real sentiment.

Honesty of emotion isn’t a requirement for a good comic book movie. It’s usually enough just to suggest feelings so that we know our heroes are human and have hearts that are in the right places and the villains aren’t and don’t. The idea is to engage our emotions so that we feel we have a rooting interest in the characters and their fates and aren’t just along for a virtual thrill ride. So directors and screenwriters and actors use tricks to trigger emotional responses. We’re willingly fooled into sympathizing through the manipulation of conventions, tropes, and clichés we’ve been trained by television and movies to respond to with laughter, anger, and tears on cue. And that’s fine. There isn’t time for serious character development in these movies, anyway. We’re not in the theater to see that either. As long as the tricks work, we don’t mind that it’s really us doing the feeling not the characters seeming to come alive on screen.

In a few comic book movies, in the best ones, something more happens. Because of good writing, good directing, and/or good acting, the prime and priming emotions are up on the screen. But it’s usually incidental. It’s not the point and, like I said, it’s not why we bought tickets.

The only exceptions I can think of are Spider-Man 2, which was great, and Iron Man 2, which was…not great.

Peter Parker’s emotional breakdown over his ambivalence about being Spider-Man is just more compelling and affecting than Tony Stark’s emotional breakdown over his ambivalence about being Iron Man, plus there’s the tragedy of Doctor Otto Octavius.

The only exceptions beforeGuardians of the Galaxy.

It’s not just that our heroes’ emotional development isn’t beside the point. It is the point. Guardians of the Galaxy is about our heroes’ developing feelings, towards and about each other and within themselves. Almost everybody with more than four lines, good guys, bad guys, and guys in between, is motivated by bonds of affection. Even the arch-villain Thanos who is indifferent to the wiping out of the populations of entire planets cares about his adopted daughters.

But it’s the developing bonds of affection between the five heroes---anti-heroes---who become known, at least to themselves, as the Guardians of the Galaxy that is at the center of the movie, gives it its heart, and drives the story.

Maybe I should put it this way to make it simple. Guardians of the Galaxy is as much a movie about friendship as Toy Story.

I think the climactic battle may even include a visual quote from Toy Story 3, but you can’t always go by me. I have a habit of reading into things, as you’ve probably noticed.

The reason the movie isn’t trite and hokey and overly-sentimental is the same reason Toy Story isn’t trite and hokey. It’s a well-written, well-directed, well-made, genuinely funny comedy.

All the Marvel comic book movies are funny. They’re full of wisecracks, one-liners, witty repartee, visual gags, and moments of pure slapstick. But most of the humor is an aside to the action. In Guardians of the Galaxy, the humor is often the source or the point of the action. The movie starts out on a somber and, frankly, sentimental note, with a scene guaranteed to make mothers cry, but in the very next scene director James Gunn announces his intentions. From here on out, we’re in it more for the laughs than the tears.

Guardians of the Galaxy is an origin story and origin stories are inherently comic because they are about the arrival of the hero and the hero’s job is to restore order. Things can take a tragic turn later. But for now, things are going to send or at least come to a rest happily. Gunn makes no bones about it. We’re headed for a happy ending. The fun and suspense is how we’re going to get there, what’s going to get in the way the Guardians have to do to overcome the obstacles and keep moving towards that happy ending.

This isn’t to say it’s all sweetness and light.

You can’t have a real comedy without the real possibility of real tragedy. Darkness threatens throughout, and all but one of the Guardians are suffering from heartbreak and loss. As Rocket Raccoon says, trying to brush away a claim on his sympathy along with his own pain and self-pity, “Boo hoo. Everybody’s got dead people!”

Let’s start where the movie starts, with Peter Quill’s dead people. Quill is the main character and eventual leader of the Guardians, the one among our team of heroes for whom the prefix anti- is the least apt. Not inapt. He’s a thief and a pirate, a scoundrel, rogue, and cad who makes Han Solo in the original Star Wars look like a gentleman of principle. But he’s the only one (at first) without murder in his heart and who feels any responsibility towards other living beings. When the job of saving the galaxy falls into his lap, he takes it on with only a token show of reluctance. He comes up with a plan, or “twelve percent of a plan”, and sets to work convincing the others to join him.

Still, he is an outlaw, proud of it, and vain of his reputation as one, a reputation that doesn’t reach as far as he thinks it should. When he announces who he is using the outlaw name he believes his known by across the galaxy, Star-Lord, it usually turns out the people he expects to be cowed by it have never heard it or heard of him. Then they can’t get it right.

His saving grace is his dead people, his mother. (Who and what his missing father is is a mystery that probably won’t be solved until Guardians of the Galaxy 3!) Quill was raised by space pirates who kidnapped him from earth in 1988 when he was a little boy on the night his mother died. He’s been carrying around with him ever since his Walkman and the awesome mix tape---that’s what it says on the label, “awesome mix tape.”--- of her favorite songs from the 1970s and early 80s she made for him and he plays it constantly. It’s the soundtrack of his life and adventures and the voice of his mother imparting her wisdom and goodness, proving that rock and roll is a joyful and moral force, as well as helping to give Guardians of the Galaxya terrific soundtrack of its own.

As played with great good humor and a dancer’s as well as an athlete’s physical grace---he’s got some moves---by Chris Pratt, in the role that will likely make him a star, Quill has a careless charm and a surfer dude’s way too easy-going, take life as it comes languidness that distracts from an intensity of feeling, energy, and intelligence that make him dangerous and immensely attractive. Pratt has a way of looking simultaneously vacant and thoughtful that lets us see why Quill is both good at what he does and easy to underestimate and even forget. It depends at what angle and at what moment you catch him whether you see the laid-back rogue or the focused hero.

The other Guardians are more emotionally twisted and tangled if not as complicated or puzzling.

Gamora (Zoe Saldana) is one of the adopted daughters of the arch-villain Thanos I mentioned earlier. Biologically re-engineered, she’s a trained assassin and soldier of fortune hired out by Thanos, along with her adopted sister Nebula, also an assassin but more formidable, being a cyborg, to the movie’s other arch-villain, Ronan the Accuser played by Lee Pace adding to the rogue’s gallery of hammy villains he began in Lincoln and continued in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, has his dead people, his father and, as he likes to say, his father before him, and he invokes them frequently to justify the grudge he’s holding against an entire planet. Ronan sends Gamora on a mission to retrieve a thing called an infinity stone that will give him the power to indulge his favorite past-time, mass murder, on a galaxy wide scale.

But Gamora, unlike Nebula, has a conscience and a sense of self-worth that’s driving her to rebel against Ronan and Thanos. She has a secret plan to keep the infinity stone for herself and either sell it for a bundle or use it to kill Ronan and Thanos, whichever works out. As it happens, the stone is in the hands of Peter Quill who, of course, doesn’t know what he has is hands on. As far as he knows, it’s just a lumpy metal ball he contracted to steal for someone else, which is to say, to him it’s just a payday, and he’s more than a little surprised when Gamora shows up, ready and eager to kill him if she has to, to take it from him.

Meanwhile, Rocket Raccoon---and by now you’ve probably heard that one of our heroes is a raccoon, a cgi creation with the voice of Bradley Cooper---a bounty hunter with an apparently thoroughly mercenary view of life and a fondness for high-caliber weaponry, has been hired to retrieve Peter Quill. Rocket shows up, along with his only friend who’s also his houseplant slash muscle, a seven foot tall animated tree named Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), at the same time as Gamora, intending to bag and pack Quill for delivery to his employers. This leads to one of the most exciting and funniest scenes in the movie, a round-robin of brawls, captures, and escapes ending with all four of the in the custody of the police who send them straight off to a maximum security prison in space where at this point we can’t help feeling they all, including Quill, belong.

In prison, they meet Drax the Destroyer, hulking elaborately tattooed tower of rage played with an endearing mix of sincerity and literal literal-mindedness by former WWE star Dave Bautista, who will become the fifth member of the team, when they finally get around to admitting they are a team. Drax’s wife and daughter were murdered by Ronan and since then Drax has been aimlessly touring the galaxy inflicting violence on all and sundry as he works out his guilt and grief, psyching himself up for a confrontation with Ronan, in which, alone, he’ll be hopelessly outmatched, which he knows and which explains why he’s taking a long and roundabout route to finding Ronan.

The five conspire to escape from prison together, their teaming up inspired by the fact that Quill’s lumpy metal ball, sold to the right person, will fetch them a fortune that split five ways will still make each of them rich beyond dreaming, and now the real action begins.

And I don’t mean the escape scene, another exciting mix of thrills, spills, chills, and laughs. And I don’t mean the plot that unfolds of trying to sell the ball and then having to stop Ronan and save the galaxy.

I mean the forming of their friendship.

The Avengers treated fans to the teaming up of some favorite superheroes, but in the end that’s all the Avengers are, a team. Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man learn to admire and respect and depend on one another, but they don’t become friends. (Bruce Banner and Tony Stark do, but we don’t find that out for certain until Iron Man 3.) They don’t need to. But the Guardians of the Galaxy can’t exist until they become friends. They can’t do anything good without each other and, as it turns out, they can’t dowithout each other. This is what I mean when I say Guardians of the Galaxy is a sentimental movie. It’s about the development of feeling, care, sympathy, and understanding between characters who aren’t heroes or aren’t heroes yet. They’re just people trying to cope.

Saldana is dynamic, thoroughly physical, intense, and surprisingly and beguilingly vulnerable as Gamora. Bautista is surprisingly lovable and funny without being at all clowning as Drax. Rocket is a scene-stealing dynamo both as a work of animation and in the work of Cooper who’s clearly having a ball not having to be Bradley Cooper and playing the sort of role it’s unlikely anyone would hire Bradley Cooper to play. Cooper gives Rocket a harsh, angry, old-fashioned movie tough guy with a cream puff of heart voice that I wouldn’t have expected out of him but which I suspect he’s been working on for his own amusement since he was a kid watching cartoons.

But the big surprise and delight is Groot. Diesel makes the most of the few words Groot has at his disposal---as Rocket explains to Quill “he don't know talkin' good like me and you, so his vocabulistics is limited to ‘I’ and ‘am’ and ‘Groot, exclusively in that order.” Quill predicts that that seemingly narrow combination of syllables will wear thin fast but in fact it doesn’t. Not for us, at any rate. Diesel uses those three little words in a variety of wonderfully expressive ways. We may not understand him when he speaks but whenever Rocket translates we know immediately that that’s exactly what Groot said.

The cgi work is just as expressive.

Another thing that makes Guardians of the Galaxy different from previous comic book movies is that it features more fully realized supporting and minor characters. These include John C. Reilly’s unflappably good-natured chief of security on the planet Ronan makes his main target, Glenn Close as the no-nonsense leader of the planet, Karen Gillan as Gamora’s implacable sister Nebula, Christopher Fairbank as a prissy fence known as the Broker, Benecio del Toro as a character I can’t begin to explain, you’ll just have to see him for yourself to get the idea, and the stand-out Michael Rooker as Yondu, the space pirate captain who abducted the young Peter Quill from Earth. Yondu loves Quill as the son he never had. He still has to kill him, understand. Business is business and a pirate captain has to do what a pirate captain has to do. But he loves the guy.

Obviously, I enjoyed the movie. I’ve been asked, though, by somewhat dubious others if they’d like it, considering they haven’t read any of the comics and don’t know the characters and their backstories. My answer is, I did and I didn’t.

Guardians of the Galaxy is the first comic book movie I went into cold without a previous rooting interest in the heroes. The comic didn’t exist when I was a comic book-reading kid and our sons weren’t fans before the movie was in the works.

I knew nothing and don’t feel like I need to know anything more than what the movie told me.

To be precise, the tenth anniversary of LanceMannion.com is September 14. I plan to do something special for you that week that doesn’t include asking for money. But I do need to do some fundraising, I’m afraid. Things as usual are tight. Tighter than ever, actually. Mrs M is still on the job hunt. Both Mannion guys are in college now. Can’t believe school starts next week. I don’t get paid until the beginning of next month. Savings are running low. And we just got hit with a couple of unexpected bills. So once again, I’m asking for your help and your patience.

Hard shell clams, beached and bleached. These are filled with sand, not the fixings for chowder. Doesn’t look like seagulls got to them. Probably some sea stars or crabs ate them down in their beds. Taken at Revere Beach, which doesn’t look at all how I remembered it from my college days. For one thing, there’s a swimmable ocean there now. I think it’s imported.

Not the beach we were at today and where I read this. Southampton, England.

I say it isn’t much of a beach, but that doesn’t do it justice, since it has a beauty all its own---more so for being seldom visited out of season except by dog-walkers and anglers. It is set at the end of a shallow bay that marks the south-eastern limits of the city. To reach it, I ride [my bike] along a waterfront set with desultory concrete shelters and backed by common land to which are chained half a dozen horses. Behind stands a post-war housing estate, one-quarter of whose population live in poverty.

The path ahead passes through a stand of trees then gives way to the beach, bordered by a waist-high sea wall with a narrow ledge, just wide enough for a person to walk along. To the landward is a sweep of grass and an avenue of oaks and pines. Gnarled and bowed, they mark an old carriageway that leads with a grandeur out of all expectation to a Tudor fort and a Cistercian abbey that once dominated this eastern bank of the estuary. Now the abbey lies in ruins, surrounded by scrubby woods and stagnant stewponds, while the fort, built out of stone robbed from the dissolved abbey, became a grand Victorian pile recently extended in a replica of itself as a series of expensive apartments.

In this interzone, the modern world has yet to wipe out the past. Although the city is in sight, this place can seem haunted on a winter’s afternoon, with its bare trees bent back by the prevailing sou’westerlies, and its torring woooden piles, the remains of long-decayed jetties. The yacht club’s boats stand unattended in their pound, the wind rattling nylon lines against aluminum masts in a continual tattoo.

No George Smiley: Philip Seymour Hoffman as Gunther Backmann, a German spymaster on the hunt for terrorists, contemplates his next move while wondering if he’s acting on principle or out of ruthless ambition in one of Hoffman’s last movies, Anton Corbijn’s adaptation of John le Carre’s novel, A Most Wanted Man.

In the novels of John le Carre, the spy game is a tawdry, debasing, corrupting, soul-curdling, heartbreaking, while you still have a heart---over time it shrivels the heart inside you when it’s not taking it right out of you---conscience-deadening business. No one who gets into and no one whose life is touched by it survives without their principles and sense of self-worth shredded. Except for George Smiley, of course.

Smiley pays a price. There’s his purgatorial marriage to Lady Ann, for a start. It’s never clear if it’s a punishment or a penance he’s assigned himself. Whichever, he seems to accept that their mutual unhappiness is his fault and it’s somehow connected to his work as a spy. But he survives, that is, he continues to do his job while holding on to some of his principles and not totally compromising others. He’s able to do this because he’s the most competent agent in British Intelligence and he’s able to be that because he’s the most modest person in the service, at least the most lacking in vanity and careerist ambitions. What ambition he does have is inextricable from his commitment to doing his job well and if that means seeking and obtaining promotion, that’s fine. Moving up (or over or across or back, as necessary. A career as a spymaster is a chess game.) isn’t self-aggrandizement as it is for the likes of a Percy Alleline. It’s taking steps towards finishing the job, being finished with it, the ultimate goal being to make spying unnecessary by defeating his Soviet counterparts and helping to bring the Cold War to an end.

If there are others like George Smiley in le Carre’s universe, one of them is not Gunther Bachmann, the German spy heading a secret and only quasi-official anti-terrorism unit in Hamburg who is a main character in le Carre’s 2008 novel A Most Wanted Man and the main character in Anton Corbijn’s film adaptation now in theaters and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of his final movies as Bachmann.

Bachmann might like to be, like Smiley, that is, if he knew who Smiley was and what he’d accomplished and how he’d accomplished it. But if he does, he’s temperamentally disqualified. For one thing, he has little of the necessary modesty. He’s vain of his skills, his intelligence, and his achievements. And he lacks the patience, for another. That’s partly due to the nature of his current assignment which is to identify and thwart imminent terrorist attacks, preferably by breaking up plots before the plotters even know what they’re plotting themselves. But it’s also due to his still being in mid-career. We know from hints dropped in the novels and TV and film adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People that at a similar point in his life Smiley hadn’t yet learned to take a longer, more objective view. The significant difference between Bachmann and Smiley, however, is that Bachmann is personally ambitious. Not to move up. To move out.

Bachmann is in Hamburg doing what he’s doing because something went terribly wrong at his last station in Beirut. We’re not told exactly what, except that it involved meddling by the CIA, against whom Bachmann now holds a grudge and whom he already despised as bloodthirsty and incompetent. But he also blames himself for having let himself be outfoxed by those bloodthirsty incompetents at the cost of the lives of several of his assets and operatives.

Bachmann is looking to restore his reputation in the hope of winning a new assignment out in the field where the real action is but also where he’ll be out of the reach of interfering superiors, politicians, and diplomats and freer to operate as he knows he knows best how to do. But he also wants to be where the people he’s spying on, deceiving, manipulating, betraying, and sacrificing to the cause aren’t his fellow Germans and innocents.

The bitter irony is that to get to that place he has to spy on, deceive, manipulate, betray, and sacrifice fellow Germans and innocents.

This doesn’t make him feel guilty, at least not that guilty. It makes him more determined to do it in order to get what he wants sooner.

This time out, there are three innocents he’s about to make use of, two German citizens and one who wishes to become a citizen.

That third innocent may not be that innocent: Issa Karpov (Grigory Dobrygin), the illegitimate son of a Soviet general and the fifteen year old Chechen girl he raped but then professed to have fallen in love with. She died shortly after Issa was born, but the general took care of their son, or at any rate paid for him to be taken care of, and then made him his heir. A pious Muslim, having been raised in his mother’s religion, who makes a show of his piety, Issa has sneaked into Germany after his release from the last of the several prisons where he spent a good part of the years since 9/11 when he was not spending them with various jihadist groups in the Middle East. He’s come to lay claim to his inheritance which his father secretly deposited in a Hamburg bank. He insists he doesn’t want the money, which for good reason he considers dirty, for his own use. The question is, then, what does he want it for? To give to charities that will help the Chechen people his father waged war upon or to funnel it to militant Islamists here in Germany or in the Middle East?

Bachmann doesn’t much care where the money might be going. If it’s going to be used to fund terrorists, he’ll put a stop to it, of course. But it’s better for his purposes if Issa plans to give it away, because Bachmann knows just where it should end up, in the accounts of his real target, a philanthropist who almost certainly skims from the many charitable organizations he advises and directs to send to terrorist groups around the world. Almost certainly.

Bachmann plans to use Issa and his money to learn for absolutely certain. That is, he plans to use Issa as bait for a trap.

The other two innocents Bachmann makes his pawns are not as innocent as they should be, either, or at any rate their consciences aren’t as clear as they’d like, which makes them both vulnerable to Bachmann’s manipulations: Issa’s idealistic lawyer, Annabelle Richter (Rachel McAdams), an attorney for an organization called Sanctuary North dedicated to helping immigrants obtain residency, citizenship, and, if they need it, political asylum, and a lovelorn banker named Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe) who finds himself caught up in Issa’s story because his bank is the front for a illegal shadow bank set up near the end of the Cold War by Brue’s father to launder money stolen by corrupt Soviet politicians and high-ranking military officers and stash it away for them for the day when they need to get out of Russia while the getting is good. One of those secret depositors was Issa’s father, and Tommy Brue’s bank is the repository for a fortune that Brue feels duty-bound to hand over to Issa, provided Issa decides that he wants it and the police don’t nab Issa beforehand.

Going in to the theater, I was wondering how Corbijn and screenwriter Andrew Bovell had gone about trying to turn a rather talky novel into a satisfying work of visual storytelling. Le Carre’s A Most Wanted Man is built upon extensive conversations and internal monologs in which characters tell each other what has happened and what is going to happen and the reasons for both. Most of the exciting and dramatic action takes place within quotation marks, that is, it takes place in a reported past, and that reporting is often second and third-hand. That’s where the more interesting and dynamic characters, Issa’s and Brue’s fathers, live too, in the past. (In the novel’s present, both are several years dead.) This works fine on the page. A story told within a story being told works on readers’ imaginations just as if it comprised a novel all on its own. But on screen characters talking about the past are just characters talking about the past. Makes for dull viewing. So I expected Corbijn and Bovell would resort to extensive flashbacks.

That isn’t what they did.

The focus is all on the present with the working out of Bachmann’s personal dilemma becoming the driving force behind the narrative. Tension and suspense build out of the questions of how ruthless he’ll be in pursuing his goals and whether or not he’ll do the right thing in the end, because he really is one of the good guys and doing his job right and doing the right thing are the same for him as they are for George Smiley. His problem is, like I said, he’s not a George Smiley.

One of his problems.

Another problem is that he may not have time to do what he needs to do, right or not. He’s competing with the state police, other spy agencies, and, once again, the CIA for Issa and the right to claim his money. The cops just want to make headlines. The other spies don’t let Bachmann in on their agendas. All he knows is that politics and politicians are involved and that always means trouble for him. But the CIA, in the ingratiating and seemingly reasonable and cooperative person of a senior analyst played by Robin Wright in an unconvincing short black wig with a sweep of scythe-sharp bangs slashing across her forehead, wants to do what the CIA did a lot in the Bush years. So we’re put into the position of rooting for Bachmann even as we suspect we won’t like what he does.

This approach doesn’t require much of a change from the Bachmann of the novel to the Bachmann on the screen. It does require significant changes in the characters of Annabelle Richter and Tommy Brue, changes that diminish them as admirable human beings but make them more dramatically useful and, not so oddly, more sympathetic by making them more vulnerable to Bachmann’s scheming and manipulations.

As Annabelle, McAdams has the difficult task of acting out from behind the tangled tresses of her long golden blonde hair. The hair is perfectly in keeping with her character or, rather, it’s a perfect expression of her character, a spoiled rich girl rebelling against her establishmentarian family by playing at being a radical lawyer trying not to look like a spoiled rich girl rebelling against her family by playing at being a radical lawyer. It would probably have been a more effective disguise if she just dressed like a lawyer instead of a grad student who’s planning the next several days holed up in the library in a determined effort to complete a draft of her dissertation, a style choice that sends confusing messages to Issa and Tommy Brue.

In the novel, Annabelle isn’t rebelling against her family, she exemplifying a family trait of taking things a few steps farther than other people in the same situation are content to. It’s not enough for her brother the psychiatrist to be a Freudian, he has to be the Freudian’s Freudian. As a liberal lawyer, it’s not enough for Annabelle to champion underdogs, she has to take on the most wretched and hopeless clients. She’s a much tougher nut than her movie counterpart. Her exploitable vulnerability is in her shaken self-confidence. She recently failed to save a client from deportation. And now she’s constantly undermining herself with the fear she’ll fail Issa in the same way.

But that version of Annabelle only makes sense in the context of her family who are characters in the book but for whom there is no room in a two-hour movie.

McAdams’ Annabelle is immature, naive, more emotional than coolly intellectual in a lawyerly way. Her commitment to her work seems more an adopted attitude than to have a real passion as its source. And she’s way out of her depth. She knows it too and, while her self-doubting counterpart in the novel feels desperately in need of help, this Annabelle is desperate to be saved from a predicament of her own making. Which makes her an easy mark for Bachmann who recognizes that what she wants is to have the whole problem taken out of her hands.

The Tommy Brue of the novel is the jovial, bluff, outgoing son of an expatriate Scot whose heart is still in the highlands. He’s competent, canny, and knows his business, and, more important, knows his customers’ businesses. He’s somebody you’d gladly trust with your Euros. But there’s something a little off. His wife despises him. He’s hopeless with his difficult and neurotic daughter, and he’s so immediately and completely smitten with Annabelle, who is less than half his age, that despite his having been married twice and having a grown daughter, he appears to have not even a teenager’s clue as to how to relate to a woman. At first glance, he comes across as charmingly young for his age, in body and at heart, but it turns out not be as much the attractive youthfulness of a man enjoying an extended prime but the pathetic boyishness of someone who’s never really grown up. And no wonder. All his life, Tommy Brue (and note how he goes by a little boy’s nickname) has been defined in other people’s eyes and in his own as another, better man’s son.

Even now, with his father seven years dead and himself running the bank for as long, he still sees himself as answering to the man he refers to as Edward Amadeus and not father, papa, or dad. When thinking his way through a problem, he’s in the habit of addressing Edward Amadeus, practically holding dialogs between himself and the old man’s ghost, essentially asking for the ghost’s advice and permission to do whatever it is Tommy thinks needs to be done.

Again, as with the Annabelle of the novel, we have a character who only makes sense in the context of his family. But Tommy’s daughter is never seen or heard from and barely mentioned. His contemptuous way appears in one brief scene only to express her contempt. And Edward Amadeus is only a stick to beat the plot along, a piece of exposition produced when required to explain the action not an active participant in the unfolding of his son’s personal drama popping up through the stage floor to intone “Remember!”

And while you’d expect that Tommy, the novel’s Tommy, to be played by someone big, hearty, and full of good cheer, he appears on screen in the small, shrunken-looking, and sad-eyed form of Willem Dafoe who plays him as a weak, self-doubting, fraud or at least a fraud in his own eyes. We hardly need the scene with the contemptuous wife. This Tommy Brue is clearly a man used to living with the knowledge that he’s contemptuous and who believes he deserves it.

The novel’s Tommy at sixty is still as devoted to his father and in awe of him as he was at twelve and he’s determined to do right by the old man’s memory, which means seeing things through as he thinks Edward Amadeus would have wanted even though that means making himself complicit in his father’s crimes and by extension Issa’s father’s far worse crimes. It’s not so much a case of the sins of the father being visited upon the son as the son volunteering to complete the transgression.

If there’s a dead father haunting the movie Tommy, it’s not one who commands respect and obedience based on love and respect, but one who terrifies based on a lifetime of bullying and abuse. And that’s the ghost Bachmann channels as he sizes Brue up as a beaten man who expects, even needs to be bullied.

It’s a rare treat, but also a bit disconcerting, to see Dafoe playing a character so completely without menace and, apparently, meanness, also without any inner reserves of strength, a weak man whose facade of competence and superiority is easily cracked. revealing a moral coward who it’s no trouble to embarrass, rattle, and cow. It was probably even more fun for me because I’d just rewatched The Grand Budapest Hotel in which his character is the embodiment of menace and meanness. But, again, still disconcerting. A part of me kept asking What evil’s at work here that this can be to Willem Dafoe?

Issa is pretty much what he is in the book, as much a puzzle and a challenge for audiences as he is for readers and for Gunther. It’s intrinsic to his character that he deflects sympathy. Simultaneously resistant to all efforts to help him and abjectly compliant and too stubbornly withdrawn to explain himself either way, he’s inscrutable, hard to figure, harder to like, self-righteous, full of his own sense of superior virtue, a sullen version of Dostoevsky’s Idiot Prince Myshkin, reflexively holding himself up as a moral example that he makes so unattractive no one wants to live it up to it even if they could.

Issa is taciturn, wary, unforthcoming. He’s not monosyllabic, but he uses as few sentences as possible and speaks haltingly as if not just thinking over each word but as translating them through his first two languages, Russian and Turkish, before delivering them in German. Dobrygin, who captures Issa’s tensed, spidery figure as described by le Carre in the novel, does most of his acting through his mournful, questioning, accusatory eyes. But when, to disguise himself, Issa’s forced to shave his beard, to his humiliation and shame, revealing Dobrygin’s own very boyish face, the mournfulness to outright sadness and pain, the questioning becomes a beseeching: “Please don’t hurt me anymore. I’m trying so hard to be good.” His whole aspect is that of a hurt little boy trying to be brave while abjectly expecting a whipping.

Which is natural considering the scars on his back from his stints in the prisons where he was torture. Issa is someone who had to withdraw so far into himself as his only defense against torture that he can’t climb out again. The little boy lostness of his expression and demeanor is what remains of the man who is lost to himself. The lost little boy would be easier to pity, however, if he wasn’t such a moral scold and quite possibly a once and future terrorist.

It may be that in using Issa Bachmann is also saving him from himself.

Which brings me to Hoffman as Bachmann.

I suppose it would have been fitting if this was one of Hoffman’s greatest performances and he’d gone out at the very top of his game. But that’s a sentimental notion and unnecessary to his legacy. In A Most Wanted Man he does what he did best throughout his career, create an entirely new person distinct from every other character he played and to do it without showiness or show-offiness and, seemingly, without effort. As he plays him, Bachmann is irritable, impatient, prone to bullying not just assets like Tommy Brue and Annabelle Richter but his superiors and his rivals in other agencies, people he should be placating if he wants to get his career back on track. He has his tender side and shows he had and probably still has a heroic one. But he’s relentless and ruthless and for the most part deliberately difficult to like and even more difficult to figure, probably because he doesn’t seem to much like himself or have himself at all figured out. Hoffman’s Bachmann is a protagonist hard to root we root for anyway because he is so confoundedly human.

Corbijn makes Hamburg a dark and guilty place. It’s as gritty and full of shadows and fog as the London of Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy but an even more oppressive, comfortless, and paranoia-inducing city and a more congenial home to spies and other villains because it’s lacking George Smiley.

What it has is a Gunther Bachmann and he and his people are lost in the gloom.

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Retrieved from the dark and guilty place known as the archives: From January 2012, my review of Aflredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley.

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A Most Wanted Man directed by Anton Corbijn, screenplay by Andrew Bovell, based on the novel by John le Carre. Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rachel McAdams, Willem Dafoe, Robin Wright, and Grigory Dobrygin. Rated R. Now in theaters.

Back to reading Updike. As if I need the heartbreak. Picking up in 1961. Updike’s 29. He’s finishing up The Centaur and has just finished a summer teaching creative writing at Harvard. He was a pretty good teacher. He liked it. Liked his students. At the end of the gig he vowed to never do it again.

Twenty years later he told an interviewer why.

“Teaching takes a lot of energy. It uses somehow the very brain cells that you should be writing with.”

This would have been about the time I was changing my headings from playwriting to fiction and working out how to set my course for Iowa. I wish I’d come across it and taken the warning. You’d think three years later I’d have figured it out for myself when I was teaching my own summer writing workshop. But I wrote like a demon that summer in that light and airy apartment below yours and Donna’s on Dubuque Street, at the most perfect desk for writing I’ve ever had, under the window with no view except into the leaves and branches of tree I never identified because it was only beginning to dawn on me trees came in more than maple and pine, in that light. I wrote a novella that I knew was no good but I didn’t care. I was having a ball.

So it wasn’t until I was teaching at Ball State that I figured it out.

But unlike Updike I kept at it.

Because the New Yorker wasn’t begging me for stories and paying me a couple thousand dollars a pop.

Just dawned on me. I may have seen more movies starring Robin Williams than movies starring any other contemporary actor. Since I reposted my review of Moscow on the Hudson, The Terrible Loneliness of Being Free, when director Paul Mazursky died last month, in honor of Williams, here’s my review from 2007 of a lesser known film of his but one I really like, The Big White.

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The Big White, starring Robin Williams, Holly Hunter, and Giovanni Ribisi, is set in a post-Northern Exposure movie and tv show dreamland where quirky characters living in quaint and eccentric small towns stumble half-comically, half-sadly through small misadventures, searching for a modest bit of happiness and at least a glimmer of understanding about how to make their lives a little better.

You Can Count On Me, The Station Agent,Garden State, Doc Hollywood, Fargo, Mumford, Sunshine State,Cookie’s Fortune—Cookie’s Fortune is an interesting case because it was Altman’s influence on TV ensemble dramas like MASH, Hill Street Blues and St Elsewhere that made Northern Exposure possible, which makes Cookie’s Fortune a case of influence as a game of telephone, the original message circling back on itself.

Some of these movies are darker than others, depending on how much to the fore they allow the facts of death and violence and the worst of life’s evils and sorrows. But, setting aside Fargo, even in the darkest of them, and The Big White is among the darkest, the main characters, even the villains, are fairly decent and well-meaning types who don’t wish each other harm. Conflict arises from the clashing interests of if not good then not really bad people forced to act selfishly to save themselves or those they love from troubles that have come about simply because what’s good for one person may be bad for another. It’s not a case of good guys versus bad guys, but trying-to-be good guys struggling to do what’s right for them against other trying-but-maybe not trying-as-hard-to-be good guys struggling to do what’s right for them.

Life is hard enough, these movies seem to be saying, even when it’s apparently going well, that for an hour and a half or two hours it’s ok for us to worry about the problems of some characters who aren’t threatened by war, natural disasters, or grinding poverty.

Life is hard enough for Paul Barnell. Barnell (Williams) is the owner of a failing travel agency. He’s up to his ears in debt. He has no prospects for digging himself out. There’s no one he can turn to for help. But his biggest problem, the one that may have partly caused the others by forcing him to take his focus and energy away from running his business, is that his wife, Margaret (Hunter), whom he adores, has gone crazy, and she shows signs of going even crazier. She’s falling down deep into herself, as if into a well. Paul has her by the tails of the pajamas she wears all the time, holding her back from the edge, but he feels his grip slipping.

Margaret can feel it slipping too. She is still sane enough to know she’s going insane and she’s terrified. So she’s convinced herself that she has developed Tourette Syndrome. Tourette is a disease, she’s reasoned, it’s an organic malfunction that can be controlled with medicine. If she has Tourette she’s not crazy, she’s just sick, and she’ll get better.

She spends a lot of her time mimicking what she thinks are the symptoms of Tourette. She’s not fooling anyone. But Paul does his best to make her believe he believes her.

Speaking of Northern Exposure,The Big White is also set in Alaska. But Northern Exposure’s Cecily was a part of Alaska. It had fitted itself into the landscape and assimilated and been assimilated by the Native American culture that was there ahead of it. In order to live there happily and feel at home in the place, all you had to do was get along with your neighbors and adapt to the rhythms of the place. You learned to love the weather. That was Fleischman’s problem. He refused to get along or adapt.

But the unnamed town that’s the setting for The Big White is a transplanted piece of Anywhere, America, an assemblage of strip malls and ranch house developments dropped on the tundra. The residents can’t adapt to living in Alaska because to go about their daily business requires them to live as if they’re in a suburb of Sacramento, Toledo, or Wilmington, Delaware.

Even in the coldest and snowiest of winters they’re forced to spend lots of time alone in their cars driving from isolated homes to isolated businesses. It’s a place that seems to have been designed to cause Seasonal Affective Disorder. The ads for Waikiki Airplanes and posters for Hawaiian vacations in Paul’s office emphasize the emptiness of the place and the futility of his business. The scenes of surfers and smiling, beautiful couples walking hand in hand on beaches don’t inspire a longing to get away. They only remind you of the cold and the snow outside and encourage a surrender to the bleakness. They don’t make you want to rush to the airport. They send you home to hide or to a bar to drink.

In such a place you wonder how it is that everyone hasn’t gone as crazy as Margaret. Then it dawns on you. They have.

Paul is convinced, naturally, that if he can just get Margaret out of here and take her someplace warm she’ll recover and return to her old self.

In order to leave and set up somewhere else, though, he needs to settle his debts.

He has only one asset, his brother’s million dollar life insurance policy that names Paul as beneficiary.

The good news is that Raymond Barnell has been missing for years, and, a wild guy, a heavy drinker, with a bad temper and a self-destructive streak, it’s a good bet he’s dead.

The bad news is that state law requires that a person be missing for seven years before they can be declared legally dead. Raymond has been gone only five. Paul has to wait two more years before he can collect on Raymond’s policy, unless, of course, Raymond’s dead body turns up.

Which it does.

Well, a dead body does.

A pair of legbreakers who, against their better nature, have upscaled their business to include murder for hire have done a guy for another, meaner thug named Dave—

First legbreaker (as they’re dumping the body): What’d he do anyway?

Second legbreaker: Don’t know. But Dave said if he did it again he’d break his neck.

It being winter and the ground being frozen and under a foot of snow, they can’t bury the body, and their being inexperienced in these matters and apparently never having watched The Sopranos, Gary and Jimbo aren’t sure how to dispose of the body. So they decide to leave it for the professionals. They drop it off in a dumpster.

Where Paul finds it.

Now all he’s got to do is pass the body off as his brother’s while deflecting the suspicions of the insurance investigator. The first part turns out to be easy. The insurance investigator is more of a problem.

Ted Watters (Ribisi) isn't just a crackerjack investigator, he's a desperate one. In his way, he's as desperate as Paul. Sent up to Alaska by his company's home office to whip the department into shape and train a promising rookie, Ted has begun to suspect that what was supposed to be the prelude to a promotion was actually a punishment for an unwitting mistake the company's never bothered to explain to him. He's been up here for thirteen months and is feeling permanently banished. When Paul shows up, attempting what Ted sees as obvious insurance fraud, he decides he can get himself back into corporate's good graces by exposing Paul and saving the company a million bucks.

He's astonished when the company execs accept Paul's story and decide to pay off. And he's frustrated when after he presses the case they tell him to forget about it. He determines to do the right thing and get the goods on Paul. This turns out to be a perverse and self-destructive move on his part and bizarrely makes him a villain in everyone else's eyes. He is shocked that doing his job, doing the honest thing, leads to his being not just disliked but physically punished by Fate. This is so obviously unfair that it just makes him more determined to bring Paul down.

Meanwhile, the thug who hired Gary and Jimbo doesn’t believe they’ve done their job. He demands visual proof. He wants to see the body. When they return to the dumpster to fetch it—apparently they’ve checked the pick-up schedule and expect it to still be where they left it—and find out it’s gone, it doesn’t take them long to figure out where it went. They’re naive for hitmen, but they’re not stupid. They guess that the body must have been discovered by someone who uses the dumpster regularly, someone in one of the businesses nearby, learn that Paul has recently buried his “brother” whose body turned up mysteriously, and track him down. They break into his house, take Margaret hostage, and demand Paul return the body.

There is some black comedy in The Big White—I won’t tell you what Paul has to go through to pass the body off as his brother’s—but this is really a very sad and sweet little movie, mainly because of the loving marriage between Paul and Margaret that is at the movie’s heart and Williams’ and Hunter’s performances.

Hunter is adorable...and believably crazy. We get only a single glimpse of Margaret as she used to be. In a home video Paul took on one of their vacations, a waiter spills a drink on her and she reacts with good grace and great good humor. What Hunter does is make us realize that in going crazy Margaret hasn’t changed that much. She is the same person we see in the video, the same person Paul fell in love with 15 years ago, only more so. It’s a terrifying and terribly sad definition of madness as an intensification of personality. Going mad means becoming more like yourself.

To a lesser degree, but still to a degree of madness, this is what has happened to both Paul and Ted too. Each man has become more like himself. And the more you are lost in yourself the less room you have for other people. Paul will always have room for Margaret, but Ted is squeezing the woman he loves out of his life, and he definitely doesn't have any room for Paul and his troubles except as means to solving his own problem.

Williams does a very nice job of using that puppy dog quality of his that can be so annoying in his Patch Adams-Love Me Love Me roles to real effect beyond playing for the camera's affections. He turns it exclusively on Margaret, making it into a blanket of niceness that he attempts to keep wrapped around her to protect her from her own fear. This frees him up to be less than nice with the other characters. Williams allows Paul to be angry. Paul isn't a martyr. He isn't resigned to what's happening to him and Margaret. It's unfair and it's awful and it makes him furious, and he can barely keep his anger in check. The unfairness of it has also made him willing to be unfair, to return meanness with meanness, and to do whatever he has to do to save Margaret, up to the point of being willing to commit murder.

As Ted, Ribisi does something you don't see young American actors do very often. He plays a thirty year old as a full-fledged adult.

Ted likes his job, he's good at it, he works hard at what he does and he defines himself by himself by his work, and he carries himself accordingly. Overgrown college boys do not hold positions of trust and responsibility like the one Ted has earned. Ted is a man doing a man's job. He's sober, serious, responsible, disciplined, decent, honest, and nuts.

Ribisi makes no special pleas for his honest and decent character's honesty and decency or for any of his other virtues. Ted may be in the right, but he's doing the right thing for suspect reasons, reasons that border on mania if not outright madness, and Ribisi fixes his eyes in an unblinking beady-eyed stare that repels sympathy. He trusts enough in the character's basic attractiveness and in his own likability as a young leading man to play up Ted's unattractive side.

He also trusts in Alison Lohman as Ted's devoted girlfriend, Tiffany. Tiffany is a lovable character---the most lovable in the movie---and it helps that Lohman is as lovable as Tiffany's supposed to be. But Ribisi doesn't simply trust that we'll like Ted for Tiffany's sake. He understands that if Ted is to be liked he must learn to be likable, and he has only one person to learn it from, Tiffany.

Getting back to Northern Exposure, Ted is the character with Joel Fleischman's problem. Like Joel, he knows he would be happier if he would just relax and learn to get along with his new neighbors. But also like Flieschman, he knows that getting along and learning to like living where he's stuck living is a form of surrender. He doesn't want to like it there. He wants out of there, now.

So he resists anything and everything that might make him like it there. This includes Tiffany.

Tiffany loves him, but Ted refuses to love her back---or to admit that he does.

The more fool him.

Tiffany runs a psychic hotline out of the house she and Ted share. She is a good-natured fraud, untroubled in her conscience by what Ted calls her "carny scam," because she believes her callers understand that she's a fake. She and they pretend together that she's a psychic so they don't have to admit to themselves that they ought to be smart enough to solve the problems they bring to her on their own.

The real point is, though, that their problems are problems and she does help solve them. What Tiffany is is a talented psychologist and practical nurse who didn't have the money or luck to go to college and earn an actual degree in the field she was born for.

Ted is blind to her talent, or pretends to be, and even more willfully blind to the fact that her most challenging client, the person who most needs her help and advice, is himself.

Lohman, who I was afraid would disappear into Hollywood movie starlet-dom after her wonderful turn as the young Jessica Lange to Ewan McGregor's young Albert Finney in Big Fish, plays Tiffany without any trace of a starlet's vanity. Tiffany is pretty because Lohman is pretty, but the fact doesn't seem to interest either one of them. Tiffany is smart too, but that doesn't matter all that much to her either. And she's good-hearted, another fact about herself Tiffany doesn't overvalue. She doesn't believe that her good-heartedness has earned her any special favors from life. This is the big difference between her and Ted and between her and Paul. She doesn't feel owed.

Learning not to feel owed is the first lesson Ted needs to learn from her.

I hope I'm getting at what Ribisi and Lohman manage to do so well by saying that watching Ted's slow realization and conversion is like watching Lohman teach Ribisi how to dance. She's an excellent and enthusiastic teacher, but patient and slow, and he's trusting enough and modest enough to let her lead.

It's to director Mark Mylod's and screenwriter Collin Friesen's great credit, as well as to Ribisi's, that they leave Ted still in the process of learning when the movie ends. Ted has only progressed so far that he's no longer stepping on her toes. He's got a ways to go before he can take over on the dance floor.

The movie doesn't end with Ted and Tiffany exactly duplicating the loving married couple, Margaret and Paul. Ted hasn't completely given in. But his last line makes clear that he'll get there.

Tiffany (taking Ted's arm as the snow falls on them): Don't you just love this weather.

Ted (looking at the sky warily but hopefully): Learning to.

Woody Harrelson makes a vivid and terrifying appearance bringing the kind of violence and menace that is usually kept just out of range in these Northern Exposure-influenced movies and shows. His character is another one who has gone nuts by becoming too much like himself. Unfortunately, in his case it means becoming more of a monster of selfishness and anger.

I think Mylod let him overdo it a bit, but Harrelson gets his final scene just right nonetheless, and it's a powerful and moving moment that leads to another sad and perfect little grace note by Williams.

Tim Blake Nelson and W. Earl Brown as the erstwhile hitmen, Gary and Jimbo, are a lot of fun, especially when Gary attempts to make Margaret admit she's faking her Tourette symptoms because he likes her and is concerned about her. Margaret calls Gary and Jimbo the Gay Mafia, but it's never clear that the characters are lovers. They are, however, married, in their fashion. They are a devoted couple and the small, quiet ways Brown and Nelson show the men's domestic familiarity and their affection are both funny and touching.

Hillary Clinton knows that when she’s running for President she’s going to have to deal with accusations of “softness” on matters of national security from the Republicans and “doubts” from the National Political Press Corps that she’s tough enough to to defend the United States from the violent hordes, within and without, that want to destroy us because of our freedoms.

This is the given any Democrat has to deal with, even war hero ones running against draft dodgers. But a woman will have an even harder time of it. So it’s probably smart politics to try to get ahead of the game and start making the case for yourself as the kind of warmonger influential neocons, armchair generals in the media, and other “serious” DC insiders think the country needs or think we rubes out in the hinterlands want. Which is why I’m hoping this interview she gave to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg is a cynically calculated bit of political theater and press manipulation.

“Yes, Jeffrey, in answer to your questions and your barely concealed hope, I do plan to kill a lot of people when I’m President. In point of fact, if I was President now I’d be killing them in Syria and Iraq by the hundreds and trying to figure out how I could kill more in Ukraine.”

In a way this interview could be a good sign.

Not of what Clinton might do as President.

Of what she’s learned since 2008 about the care and feeding of the Press.

I’ve complained about this.

Democrats have got to learn that treating the members of the Church of the Savvy with the contempt they deserve is not smart. Using the internet to go around them or through them to take your message straight to the voters only works to the degree independents and waverers aren’t getting other messages and the mainstream media still deliver those other messages to millions of people. And if those other messages don’t include your take on things or sympathetic accounts of your take, all those millions of people hear is Republican spin and the retelling of the current pet narratives and conventional wisdom constructed over liquid lunches by journalists and pundits who don’t like you.

And I blame this on the White House. It’s their job to keep the press on their side at least to the point of wanting to get the President’s positions straight. It shouldn’t matter that they don’t like you. They should do their jobs anyway. But they’re only human with, in addition to the normal allowance of flaws and foibles, a set peculiar to themselves, starting with extra-large egos.

And I blame the President even more. Not just because he’s the boss and shouldn’t let this go on. But because he’s made a practice of seeking out reporters he thinks have gotten a story wrong and telling them how they’ve goofed up in front of other reporters.

He’s a former teacher. He should know better. No one likes to be corrected, especially in public. They don’t appreciate it. They don’t learn from it. They sure as hell don’t thank you for it.

“Gosh, teach, I guess I’m an idiot. Thanks for pointing that out. I’m a better and smarter person for it.”

They resent it. They resent you.

But then he was a law professor. Maybe his teaching model was John Houseman’s character in The Paper Chase and he thinks “Here’s a dime. Call your mother and tell her you’re not fit to be a lawyer” is an effective motivational speech.

Of course they got it wrong! They don’t know what you know. They’re not experts, even if a few of them can justly pride themselves on having some expertise. They need to be prepared, given lots of background, have it explained to them three times beforehand, not left to figure it out on their own afterwards when instead of asking you because you’ll be busy and they’ll be on deadline, they’ll hash it out in a hurry with each other, which is bound to lead to a less than perfect understanding of the key points and issues. And these are not on the whole brilliant people. Journalism is not a field that attracts geniuses or, for that matter, rewards genius. Being too smart can actually work against you. It often results in minute taxonomic descriptions of individual tree species complete with Latin names while whole forests are left unobserved.

(See what I mean?)

This doesn’t mean they aren’t smart.

You have to be smart to do the most important part of the job, collect and organize facts and put them in the form of an interesting and well-written story. But they’ve been promoted above their level of competence. Political journalists aren’t just reporters. They’re “analysts.” They have to turn out “think pieces.”

Jake Tapper may be (or may have been) a smart reporter, Chuck Todd was smart (and may still be smart) with numbers, but neither is a deep or profound thinker.

And then we’re talking about a company of prima donnas.

They worked hard to get to the top of their profession and they’ve impressed themselves every step of the way. They think that years of accumulated experience, of having filled their mental attics to the rafters with facts and figures---never mind how much of it is just trivia---and history---never mind of much of that is actually gossip---and imbibed the wisdom of so many acknowledged statesmen and women---never mind how many of them were frauds and how much of that wisdom was merely folk, conventional, or received---has made them at least the equal of any mere President in knowledge and intellectual muscle. They’re vain, egotistical, and self-important, qualities that routinely reduce geniuses to idiots and, like I said, they’re not geniuses to begin with.

Add to this that a great many of them went to Ivy League or Ivy League caliber schools and that’s done to them what such elite educations have a way of doing, filling graduates with a sense of entitlement and privilege.

We plebes with degrees from state schools call it being spoiled.

And, along with everything else, they’re insecure because of their elite educations. After all, their former classmates went on to be lawyers, doctors, scientists, and bankers and stockbrokers and hedge fund managers raking in the dough in sackfuls. No wonder they’re prickly and easily wounded. Deep down, well, probably not all that deep down, they must feel like dopes and suckers and outright failures in comparison.

This is not how they see themselves, of course.

But that’s what should make it easy. The trick is to convince them you see them as they like to see themselves.

As smart. As important. As insiders. As players.

Start by keeping them well-fed, well-lubricated, and well-taken care of by pretty and polite young women and pretty and polite young men. For your own part, give them more than just the time of day. Talk to them like they’re smart. Talk to them like you’re interested in what they think. Sit down with them and let them tell you what you need to do. Smile and nod appreciatively. Frown thoughtfully from time to time. Make them think you’re really going to take what they say into consideration. Come back later and pretend you have. Say things like “I passed along what you said to the Secretary of State” and “I was talking to Senator so and so’s chief of staff and she said the Senator was thinking along those exact lines.”

You’re a politician, for Tammany’s sake! This kind of harmless hypocrisy should be second nature.

Whatever you do, don’t show your contempt, even if they deserve it. Especially if they deserve it. The ones who most deserve it are also the ones who are most likely to run whining about it to the Republicans who will be all to glad to smooth their ruffled feathers.

Just to be safe, make a point of telling them what they want to hear or of telling them what they need to hear in a way that flatters their egos.

“Did you hear what the President said? That’s pretty much exactly what I was saying to him the other day.”

So that’s what I’m hoping Clinton was doing in her interview with Goldberg, because, God help me, it’s not what I what I want to hear. In fact, a lot of it makes me much less happy than I was at the prospect of voting for her.

But that was bound to happen. And it won’t be long before she says something else that renews my enthusiasm. It’s always up and down with your candidates when you’re a liberal Democrat. And a politician’s gotta do what a politician’s gotta do, and often that means pander.

Politicians who don’t have to pander to some constituency are politicians who don’t need or want the votes of anybody but the faithful.

Clinton needs to pander to the press corps.

And that’s what I think she’s doing just by giving Goldberg all this access. I’m sure she believes a good deal of what she’s saying, although much of it’s claptrap, but it’s the phrasing and emphasis that matters. She’s putting it in a way Goldberg probably likes because it’s how he’d put it himself. She’s telling him what he wants to hear, that she believes force or the threat of it is the answer to all our foreign policy problems, that when she’s President she’ll be as bloodthirsty and as willing to send other people’s children to fight and die as the next guy, the next guy being either Lindsey Graham or John McCain, and---a very important point---she doesn’t like Barack Obama any more than Goldberg as his pals in the press do.

Maybe it’ll work. Or help a little anyway. But she’s forgetting something.

She’s a Clinton.

There are rules against that.

First rule: If a Clinton does it, says it, thinks it, or can be suspected of wanting to do it, say it, or think it, it’s wrong.

Updated with information passed along by professional Goldberg-watchers, of which there is at least one, me:

This has been gnawing at me since I read the Goldberg’s interview with Clinton. Did you notice how proud he is of having sources among “professional Clinton-watchers” and how happy it makes him to pass along what they’ve told him about what they think she’s thinking as facts?

Professional Clinton-watchers? This is a job? Does it pay? Where are their offices? At think tanks? At universities? Are there endowed chairs in Clinton-watching?

You know what we rubes in the hinterlands call people like “professional Clinton-watchers”?

Something very like this dismissiveness is bound to come up again next time out when she runs on her record as Secretary of State which as Tom Watson has written about includes a lot of focus on those frivolous issues affecting women and children. The serious people will say this proves she’s not one of them. Tom calls this her greatest credential.